BECKETT’S RIDDLE CONTINUES TO CONFOUND Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is not an easy play to write about, let alone produce, act, or even watch. It’s challenging, opaque, and ambiguous. On the surface, it’s about nothing at all. Deep down, however, it’s about everything. It carries a multiplicity of meanings that accumulate like the rings…

PASSIONLESS PRONOUNCEMENTS Freud’s enduring question persists: “What do women want?” Gina Gionfriddo’s aggressively hip drama, now in an equally frenetic staging by Kimberly Senior, offers a Cosmo-cute depiction of the perils and promises of feminism. It focuses like a lame laser on the (supposedly) only choices facing its female characters’”college and a career or love,…

WHEN IN ROME, DO AS THE ROMANS DO (NOT THE BRITISH) With Puccini’s Tosca, Lyric Opera has done one update too many this season. Don Giovanni was bumped up 300+ years in time to the 1920s, Capriccio 100+ years also to the 1920s, and Il Trovatore was transposed forward 400+ years to the 19th  century. Only…

THE JUICY APPLES’ SLICE OF LOVE You can’t keep an eloquent family down. TimeLine Theatre Company’s concurrent productions of election-night episodes from Richard Nelson’s Apple Family Plays contrasts That Hopey Changey Thing  (reviewed separately),  set in 2010, with Sorry, which occurs  two years later very early on the day of Obama’s reelection. The locale for both is  the quaint…

ACTION SNAPSHOTS IN AN APPLE HARVEST Commissioned by New York’s Public Theatre, the four-part saga Apple Family Plays by the prolific Richard Nelson is a remarkable effort to preserve the present. Spanning the first four years of this decade, these very topical and time-sensitive one-acts are actual’”rather than virtual’”time capsules, detailing the ups and downs…

RELUCTANT HEROISM IN A CHANGING CAUSE Oracle Theatre, Chicago’s 44-seat public-access venue where tickets are free, just unleashed another populist piledriver. It’s a play with several sources. Adapted by Emma Stanton, Nigel O’Hearn, and Thom Pasculi from a drama assembled by collage-composer Charles Mee, Circle-Machine unavoidably channels Bertolt Brecht’s proletarian parable The Caucasian Chalk Circle….

NO BOYS IN THIS BAND In only 80 minutes, Grant James Barjas’s  Accidentally, Like a Martyr assembles the very actual denizens of an obscure, unnamed gay bar on Manhattan’s East Side’”and makes them matter. This Chicago premiere from A Red Orchid Theatre, pointedly staged by Shade Murray, delivers all the fleeting gay intimacies and enmities of…

ONE HAND, ONE HEART’”ONE HIT! Sadly,  hate conquers all  in  West Side Story,  but the love we see and feel can hold its own. Though over a half-century old, the Bernstein/Laurents/Sondheim/Robbins tour-de-force is, like its Shakespearean source, young as first love. You don’t revive it, you detonate it, as happens repeatedly in Drury Lane’s dynamic production, which thankfully has…

LET THERE BE DARK In endurance sagas such as Lord of the Flies and The Blue Lagoon, stranded youngsters on deserted islands try to reimagine civilization by mimicking adult classics, or else surrender to the anarchy that underlies’”and undermines’”innocence. A similar phenomenon happens in Anne Washburn’s post-apocalyptic fantasy Mr. Burns, a Midwest premiere from Theater…